Genres work through conventions of communicative patterns. Variation in them is related to sociolinguistic parameters of writers and readers as well as situational and contextual factors, including culture. Conventions of writing change slowly and there are elements that remain constant throughout centuries but acquire new connotations. I shall first discuss genre theories and methods of studies at the interface between language and literature, and then provide a case study. The top genre of scholastic research was the commentary with a distinct genre structure. It was first introduced in Middle English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and became established in Early Modern English, as my examples will show. The transition period is particularly intriguing as the old thought style began to give way to new ideas, and observation proved inherited wisdom erroneous. Commentaries had an afterlife in spurious writings, providing an empirical example of genre dynamics and proving the usefulness of the notion of genre script as applied in this case study.
de Acosta, José. 1604. The naturall and morall historie of the East and West Indies Intreating of the remarkable things …which are proper to that country… translated into English by E.G., London: Printed by Val. Sims for Edward Blount and William Aspley.
Anon. 1684. ARISTOTELES MASTER-PIECE Or The Secrets of Generation displayed in all the parts thereof. London: Printed for J. How.
Early English Books Online (EEBO). ProQuest LLC. Available online at: [URL].
Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT). 2010. Compiled by Irma Taavitsainen, Pahta Päivi, Turo Hiltunen, Martti Mäkinen, Ville Marttila, Maura Ratia, Carla Suhr and Jukka Tyrkkö, CD-ROM with EMEMT Presenter software by Raymond Hickey. Irma Published together with Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (eds), Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus description and studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Leitner, Magdalena & Andreas H. Jucker
2021. Historical Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 687 ff.
2021. Approaches and Methods in Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 567 ff.
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